fell on the shoulders of Minnie. The wages of a “tweeny” are not
excessive, and the way in which she managed to support herself and
her invalid mother must have excited the wonder of the other dwellers
in the building if they had not had more pressing affairs of their
own to wonder about. Minnie was a short, sallow little thing, with a
rather full figure, and heavy gray eyes that somehow conveyed a sense
of sleeping passion. She had a certain instinct for dress, a knack of
putting some trinket in the right place, and of always being neat.
Mrs. Bastien-Melland had one day asked who she was. On being
informed, her curiosity did not prompt her to push the matter
further, and she did not speak to her, but the incident gave Minnie
a better standing in the domestic household at Hyde Park Square. It
was probably this attention that caused Meads, the head dog-groom,
to cast an eye in her direction. It is certain that he did so, and,
moreover, on a certain Thursday evening had taken her to a cinema
performance in the Edgware Road. Such attention naturally gave rise
to discussion and alas! to jealousy, for there was an under housemaid
and even a lady’s maid who were not impervious to the attentions of
the good-looking groom.
When Mrs. Bastien-Melland went to Egypt in January she took only
three of the small dogs with her, for she could not be bothered
with the society of a groom, and three dogs were as many as her two
maids could spare time for after devoting their energies to Mrs.
Bastien-Melland’s toilette. Consequently, Meads was left behind, and
was held directly responsible for seven, five Chows and two Pekinese,
or, as he expressed it, “over a thousand pounds worth of dogs.”
It was a position of enormous responsibility. They had to be fed on
the very best food, all carefully prepared and cooked and in small
quantities. They had to be taken for regular exercise and washed in
specially prepared condiments. Moreover, at the slightest symptom
of indisposition he was to telephone to Sir Andrew Fossiter, the
great veterinary specialist, in Hanover Square. It is not to be
wondered at that Meads became a person of considerable standing
and envy, and that little Minnie Birdle was intensely flattered
when he occasionally condescended to look in her direction. She had
been in Mrs. Bastien-Melland’s service now for seven months and the
attentions of the dog-groom had not only been a matter of general
observation for some time past, but had become a subject of reckless
mirth and innuendo among the other servants.
One night she was hurrying home. Her mother had been rather worse
than usual of late, and she was carrying a few scraps that the cook
had given her. It was a wretched night and she was not feeling well
herself, a mood of tired dejection possessed her. She crossed the
drab street off Lisson Grove and as she reached the curb her eye
lighted on Old Fags. He did not see her. He was walking along the
gutter patting the road occasionally with his stick.
She had not spoken to him since the occasion we have mentioned. For
once he was not talking: his eyes were fixed in listless apathy on
the road. As he passed she caught the angle of his chin silhouetted
against the window of a shop. For the rest of her walk the haunting
vision of that chin beneath the drawn cheeks, and the brooding
hopelessness of those sunken eyes, kept recurring to her. Perhaps
in some remote past he had been as good to look upon as Meads, the
groom! Perhaps some one had cared for him! She tried to push this
thought from her, but some chord in her nature seemed to have been
awakened and to vibrate with an unaccountable sympathy toward this
undesirable fellow-lodger.
She hurried home and in the night was ill. She could not go to Mrs.
Melland’s for three days and she wanted the money badly. When she
got about again she was subject to fainting fits and sickness. On
one such occasion, as she was going upstairs, at the Buildings, she
felt faint, and leant against the wall just as Old Fags was going
up. He stopped and said: “Hullo, now, what are we doing? Oh, dear!
Oh, dear!” and she said: “It’s all right, old ’un.” These were the
kindest words she had ever spoken to Old Fags.
During the next month there were strange symptoms about Minnie Birdle
that caused considerable comment, and there were occasions when old
Mrs. Birdle pulled herself together and became the active partner
and waited on Minnie. On one such occasion Old Fags came home late
and, after drawing a cork, varied his usual programme of talking
and snoring by singing in a maudlin key, and old Mrs. Birdle came
banging at his door and shrieked out: “Stop your row, you old----. My
daughter is ill. Can’t you hear?” And Old Fags came to his door and
blinked at her and said: “Ill, is she? Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Would she
like some stew, eh?” And old Mrs. Birdle said: “No, she don’t want
any of your muck,” and bundled back. But they did not hear any more
of Old Fags that night or any other night when Minnie came home queer.
Early in March Minnie got the sack from Hyde Park Square. Mrs.
Melland was still away, having decided to winter in Rome; but the
housekeeper assumed the responsibility of this action, and in writing
to Mrs. Melland justified the course she had taken by saying that
“she could not expect the other maids to work in the same house with
an unmarried girl in that condition.” Mrs. Melland, whose letter in
reply was full of the serious illness of poor little Anisette (one
of the Chows), that she had suffered in Egypt on account of a maid
giving it too much rice with its boned chicken, and how much better
it had been in Rome under the treatment of Doctor Lascati, made no
special reference to the question of Minnie Birdle, only saying that
“she was so sorry if Mrs. Bellingham was having trouble with these
tiresome servants.”
The spring came and the summer, and the two inhabitants of Room 476
eked out their miserable existence. One day Minnie would pull herself
together and get a day’s charing, and occasionally Mrs. Birdle
would struggle along to a laundry in Maida Vale where a benevolent
proprietress would pay her one shilling and threepence to do a
day’s ironing, for the old lady was rather neat with her hands. And
once when things were very desperate the brother of a nephew from
Walthamstow turned up. He was a small cabinet maker by trade, and
he agreed to allow them three shillings a week “till things righted
themselves a bit.” But nothing was seen of Meads, the groom. One
night Minnie was rather worse and the idea occurred to her that she
would like to send a message to him. It was right that he should
know. He had made no attempt to see her since she had left Mrs.
Melland’s service. She lay awake thinking of him and wondering how
she could send a message, when she suddenly thought of Old Fags. He
had been quiet of late, whether the demand for cigarette ends was
abating and he could not afford the luxuries that their disposal
seemed to supply, or whether he was keeping quiet for any ulterior
reason she was not able to determine.
In the morning she sent her mother across to ask him if he would
“oblige by calling at Hyde Park Square and asking Mr. Meads if he
would oblige by calling at 476, Bolingbroke Buildings, to see Miss
Birdle.” There is no record of how Old Fags delivered this message,
but it is known that that same afternoon Mr. Meads did call. He left
about three-thirty in a great state of perturbation and in a very
bad temper. He passed Old Fags on the stairs, and the only comment
he made was: “I never have any luck! God help me!” and he did not
return, although he had apparently promised to do so.
In a few weeks’ time the position of the occupants of Room 476 became
desperate. It was, in fact, a desperate time all round. Work was
scarce and money scarcer. Waves of ill-temper and depression swept
Bolingbroke Buildings. Mrs. Read had gone--heaven knows where. Even
Old Fags seemed at the end of his tether. True, he still managed to
secure his inevitable bottle, but the stews became scarcer and less
potent. All Mrs. Birdle’s time and energy were taken up in nursing
Minnie, and the two somehow existed on the money now increased to
four shillings a week, which the sympathetic cabinet maker from
Walthamstow allowed them. The question of rent was shelved. Four
shillings a week for two people means ceaseless gnawing hunger. The
widow and her daughter lost pride and hope, and further messages
to Mr. Meads failed to elicit any response. The widow became so
desperate that she even asked Old Fags one night if he could spare a
little stew for her daughter who was starving. The pungent odour of
the hot food was too much for her. Old Fags came to the door.
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” he said. “What trouble there is! Let’s see what
we can do!”
He messed about for some time and then took it across to them. It
was a strange concoction. Meat that it would have been difficult
to know what to ask for at the butcher’s, and many bones, but the
onions seemed to pull it together. To any one starving it was good.
After that it became a sort of established thing--whenever Old
Fags _had_ a stew he sent some over to the widow and daughter. But
apparently things were not doing too well in the cigarette end trade,
for the stews became more and more intermittent, and sometimes were
desperately “boney.”
And then one night a terrible climax was reached. Old Fags was
awakened in the night by fearful screams. There was a district nurse
in the next room, and also a student from a great hospital. No one
knows how it all affected Old Fags. He went out at a very unusual
hour in the early morning, and seemed more garrulous and meandering
in his speech. He stopped the widow in the passage and mumbled
incomprehensible solicitude. Minnie was very ill for three days, but
she recovered, faced by the insoluble proposition of feeding three
mouths instead of two, and two of them requiring enormous quantities
of milk.
This terrible crisis brought out many good qualities in various
people. The cabinet maker sent ten shillings extra and others came
forward as though driven by some race instinct. Old Fags disappeared
for ten days after that. It was owing to an unfortunate incident
in Hyde Park when he insisted on sleeping on a flower bed with a
gin-bottle under his left arm, and on account of the uncompromising
attitude that he took up toward a policeman in the matter. When he
returned things were assuming their normal course. Mrs. Birdle’s
greeting was:
“’Ullo, old ’un, we’ve missed your stoos.”
But Old Fags had undoubtedly secured a more stable position in the
eyes of the Birdles, and one day he was even allowed to see the baby.
He talked to it from the door. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” he said. “What a
beautiful little baby! What a dear little baby! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”
The baby shrieked with unrestrained terror at sight of him, but that
night some more stew was sent in.
Then the autumn came on. People whose romantic instincts had been
touched at the arrival of the child gradually lost interest and fell
away. The cabinet maker from Walthamstow wrote a long letter saying
that after next week the payment of the four shillings would have to
stop. He “hoped he had been of some help in their trouble, but that
things were going on all right now. Of course he had to think of his
own family first,” and so on. The lawyers of the remote landlord,
who was assiduously killing stags in Scotland, “regretted that their
client could not see his way to allow any further delay in the matter
of the payment of rent due.” The position of the Birdle family became
once more desperate. Old Mrs. Birdle had become frailer, and though
Minnie could now get about she found work difficult to obtain,
owing to people’s demand for a character from the last place. Their
thoughts once more reverted to Meads, and Minnie lay in wait for him
one morning as he was taking the dogs out. There was a very trying
scene ending in a very vulgar quarrel, and Minnie came home and cried
all the rest of the day and through half the night. Old Fags’s stews
became scarcer and less palatable. He, too, seemed in dire straits.
We now come to an incident that we are ashamed to say owes its
inception to the effect of alcohol. It was a wretched morning in late
October, bleak and foggy. The blue-gray corridors of Bolingbroke
Buildings seemed to exude damp. The strident voices of the unkempt
children quarrelling in the courtyard below permeated the whole
Buildings. The strange odour that was its characteristic lay upon it
like the foul breath of some evil god. All its inhabitants seemed
hungry, wretched and vile. Their lives of constant protest seemed
for the moment lulled to a sullen indifference, whilst they huddled
behind their gloomy doors and listened to the rancorous railings of
their offspring. The widow Birdle and her daughter sat silently in
their room. The child was asleep. It had had its milk, and it would
have to have its milk whatever happened. The crumbs from the bread
the women had had at breakfast lay ungathered on the bare table. They
were both hungry and very desperate. There was a knock at the door,
Minnie went to it, and there stood Old Fags. He leered at them meekly
and under his arm carried a gin-bottle three parts full.
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” he said. “What a dreadful day! What a dreadful
day! Will you have a little drop of gin to comfort you? Now! What do
you say?”
Minnie looked at her mother; in other days the door would have been
slammed in his face, but Old Fags had certainly been kind in the
matter of the stews. They asked him to sit down. Then old Mrs. Birdle
did accept “just a tiny drop” of gin, and they both persuaded Minnie
to have a little. Now neither of the women had had food of any worth
for days, and the gin went straight to their heads. It was already
in Old Fags’s head firmly established. The three immediately became
garrulous. They all talked volubly and intimately. The women railed
Old Fags about his dirt, but allowed that he had “a good ’eart.” They
talked longingly and lovingly about his “stoos,” and Old Fags said:
“Well, my dears, you shall have the finest stoo you’ve ever had in
your lives to-night.”
He repeated this nine times, only each time the whole sentence
sounded like one word. Then the conversation drifted to the child,
and the hard lot of parents, and by a natural sequence to Meads, its
father. Meads was discussed with considerable bitterness, and the
constant reiteration of the threat by the women that they meant “to
’ave the lor on ’im all right,” mingled with the jeering sophistries
of Old Fags on the “genalman’s behaviour,” and the impossibility of
expecting “a dog-groom to be sportsman,” lasted a considerable time.
Old Fags talked expansively about “leaving it to him,” and somehow as
he stood there with his large puffy figure looming up in the dimly
lighted room, and waving his long arms, he appeared to the women
a figure of portentous significance. He typified powers they had
not dreamt of. Under the veneer of his hide-bound depravity Minnie
seemed to detect some slow-moving force trying to assert itself. He
meandered on in a vague monologue, using terms and expressions they
did not know the meaning of. He gave the impression of some fettered
animal launching a fierce indictment against the fact of its life. At
last he took up the gin-bottle and moved to the door and then leered
round the room. “You shall have the finest stoo you’ve ever had in
your life to-night, my dears!” He repeated this seven times again and
then went heavily out.
That afternoon a very amazing fact was observed by several
inhabitants of Bolingbroke Buildings. Old Fags washed his face! He
went out about three o’clock without his sack. His face had certainly
been cleaned up and his clothes seemed in some mysterious fashion to
hold together. He went across Lisson Grove and made for Hyde Park
Square. He hung about for nearly an hour at the corner, and then he
saw a man come up the area steps of a house on the south side and
walk rapidly away. Old Fags followed him. He took a turning sharp to
the left through a mews and entered a narrow street at the end. There
he entered a deserted-looking pub. kept by an ex-butler and his wife.
He passed right through to a room at the back and called for some
beer. Before it was brought Old Fags was seated at the next table
ordering gin.
“Dear, oh dear! what a wretched day!” said Old Fags.
The groom grunted assent. But Old Fags was not to be put off by mere
indifference. He broke ground on one or two subjects that interested
the groom, one subject in particular being dog. He seemed to have a
profound knowledge of dog, and before Mr. Meads quite realized what
was happening he was trying gin in his beer at Old Fags’s expense.
The groom was feeling particularly morose that afternoon. His luck
seemed out. Bookmakers had appropriated several half-crowns that he
sorely begrudged, and he had other expenses. The beer-gin mixture
comforted him, and the rambling eloquence of the old fool who seemed
disposed to be content paying for drinks and talking, fitted in with
his mood.
They drank and talked for a full hour, and at length got to a
subject that all men get to sooner or later if they drink and talk
long enough--the subject of woman. Mr. Meads became confiding and
philosophic. He talked of women in general and what triumphs and
adventures he had had among them in particular. But what a trial and
tribulation they had been to him in spite of all. Old Fags winked
knowingly and was splendidly comprehensive and tolerant of Meads’s
peccadillos.
“It’s all a game,” said Meads. “You’ve got to manage ’em. There ain’t
much I don’t know, old bird!”
Then suddenly Old Fags leaned forward in the dark room and said:
“No, Mr. Meads, but you ought to play the game you know. Oh, dear,
yes!”
“What do you mean, _Mister Meads_?” said that gentleman sharply.
“Minnie Birdle, eh? you haven’t mentioned Minnie Birdle yet!” said
Old Fags.
“What the devil are you talking about?” said Meads drunkenly.
“She’s starving,” said Old Fags, “starving, wretched, alone with her
old mother and your child. Oh, dear! yes, it’s terrible!”
Meads’s eyes flashed with a sullen frenzy, but fear was gnawing at
his heart, and he felt more disposed to placate this mysterious old
man than to quarrel with him.
“I tell you I have no luck,” he said after a pause. Old Fags looked
at him gloomily and ordered some more gin. When it was brought he
said:
“You ought to play the game, you know, Mr. Meads--after all--luck?
Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Would you rather be the woman? Five shillings a
week you know would----”
“No, I’m damned if I do!” cried Meads fiercely. “It’s all right for
all these women. Gawd! How do I know if it’s true? Look here, old
bird, do you know I’m already done in for two five bobs a week, eh?
One up in Norfolk and the other at Enfield. Ten shillings a week
of my----money goes to these blasted women. No fear, no more, I’m
through with it!”
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” said Old Fags, and he moved a little further
into the shadow of the room and watched the groom out of the
depths of his sunken eyes. But Meads’s courage was now fortified
by the fumes of a large quantity of fiery alcohol, and he spoke
witheringly of women in general and seemed disposed to quarrel if
Old Fags disputed his right to place them in the position that Meads
considered their right and natural position. But Old Fags gave no
evidence of taking up the challenge: on the contrary he seemed to
suddenly shift his ground. He grinned and leered and nodded at
Meads’s string of coarse sophistry, and suddenly he touched him on
the arm and looked round the room and said very confidentially:
“Oh, dear! yes, Mr. Meads. Don’t take too much to heart what I said.”
And then he sniffed and whispered:
“I could put you on to a very nice thing, Mr. Meads. I could
introduce you to a lady I know would take a fancy to you, and you to
her. Oh, dear, yes!”
Meads pricked up his ears like a fox-terrier and his small eyes
glittered.
“Oh!” he said. “Are you one of those, eh, old bird? Who is she?”
Old Fags took out a piece of paper and fumbled with a pencil. He then
wrote down a name and address somewhere at Shepherd’s Bush.
“What’s a good time to call?” said Meads.
“Between six and seven,” answered Old Fags.
“Oh, hell!” said Meads, “I can’t do it. I’ve got to get back and take
the dogs out at half-past five, old bird. From half-past five to
half-past six. The missus is back, she’ll kick up a hell of a row.”
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” said Old Fags. “What a pity! The young lady is
going away, too!”
He thought for a moment, and then an idea seemed to strike him.
“Look here, would you like me to meet you and take the dogs round the
park till you return?”
“What!” said Meads. “Trust you with a thousand pounds’ worth of dogs!
Not much!”
“No, no, of course not, I hadn’t thought of that!” said Old Fags
humbly.
Meads looked at him, and it is very difficult to tell what it was
about the old man that gave him a sudden feeling of complete trust.
The ingenuity of his speech, the ingratiating confidence that a
mixture of beer-gin gives, tempered by the knowledge that famous
pedigree Pekinese would be almost impossible to dispose of, perhaps
it was a combination of these motives. In any case a riotous impulse
drove him to fall in with Old Fags’s suggestion, and he made the
appointment for half-past five.
* * * * *
Evening had fallen early, and a fine rain was driving in fitful gusts
when the two met at the corner of Hyde Park. There were ten little
dogs on their lead, and Meads with a cap pulled close over his eyes.
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” cried Old Fags as he approached. “What dear
little dogs! What dear little dogs!”
Meads handed the lead over to Old Fags, and asked more precise
instructions of the way to get to the address.
“What are you wearing that canvas sack inside your coat for, old
bird, eh?” asked Meads, when these instructions had been given.
“Oh, my dear sir,” said Old Fags. “If you had the asthma like I get
it, and no underclothes on these damp days! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”
He wheezed drearily and Meads gave him one or two more exhortations
about the extreme care and tact he was to observe.
“Be very careful with that little Chow on the left lead. ’E’s got his
coat on, see? ’E’s ’ad a chill and you must keep ’im on the move.
Gently, see?”
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Poor little chap! What’s his name?” said Old
Fags.
“Pelleas,” answered Mr. Meads.
“Oh, poor little Pelleas! Poor little Pelleas! Come along. You won’t
be too long, Mr. Meads, will you?”
“You bet I won’t,” said the groom, and nodding he crossed the road
rapidly and mounting a Shepherd’s Bush motor-bus he set out on his
journey to an address that didn’t exist.
Old Fags ambled slowly round the Park, snuffling and talking to the
dogs. He gauged the time when Meads would be somewhere about Queen’s
Road, then he ambled slowly back to the point from which he had
started. With extreme care he piloted the small army across the high
road and led them in the direction of Paddington. He drifted with
leisurely confidence through a maze of small streets. Several people
stopped and looked at the dogs, and the boys barked and mimicked
them, but nobody took the trouble to look at Old Fags. At length he
came to a district where their presence seemed more conspicuous.
Rows of squalid houses and advertisement hoardings. He slightly
increased his pace, and a very stout policeman standing outside a
funeral furnisher’s glanced at him with a vague suspicion. However,
in strict accordance with an ingrained officialism that hates to act
“without instructions,” he let the cortège pass. Old Fags wandered
through a wretched street that seemed entirely peopled by children.
Several of them came up and followed the dogs.
“Dear little dogs, aren’t they? Oh my, yes, dear little dogs!” he
said to the children. At last he reached a broad gloomy thoroughfare
with low irregular buildings on one side, and an interminable length
of hoardings on the other that screened a strip of land by the
railway--land that harboured a wilderness of tins and garbage. Old
Fags led the dogs along by the hoarding. It was very dark. Three
children, who had been following, tired of the pastime, had drifted
away. He went along once more. There was a gap in a hoarding on which
was notified that “Pogram’s Landaulettes could be hired for the
evening at an inclusive fee of two guineas. Telephone, 47901 Mayfair.”
The meagre light from a street lamp thirty yards away revealed a
colossal coloured picture of a very beautiful young man and woman
stepping out of a car and entering a gorgeous restaurant, having
evidently just enjoyed the advantage of this peerless luxury. Old
Fags went on another forty yards and then returned. There was no one
in sight.